Oh! What a Lovely War: An interview with Murray Melvin

Back to Stratford East. Murray Melvin, who died in 2023, shares his memories of the original Theatre Workshop production of Oh! What a Lovely War and describes Joan Littlewood’s working methods.

Sammy Going South, Suez and the end of the British Empire

Written for Terence Towles Canote's 13th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon.

We British have a habit of turning military debacles into victories. The retreat from Dunkirk, for instance, has twice been the subject of a film (in 1958 and 2017) and also forms an important part of the action in Atonement from 2007.

But the Suez Crisis of 1956, whether because of the deceit it involved or its abject failure, has proved too shameful a subject for British cinema to tackle. This unsuccessful attempt to overturn Egypt’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal, made together with France and Israel, and in particular the way we were forced to back down by a threat from the United States to spark a run on the pound, marked the end of British illusions that is could remain an imperial power in the postwar world.

So it’s notable that there is a British film that begins amid the British bombing of Port Said. But, of a piece with the doomed Suez operation as a whole, that bombing kills the parents of a 10-year-old British boy, Sammy Hartland. Finding no help in a suddenly hostile town, the boy sets off, with no concept of the distance involved, to walk to his only relative, an aunt who lives in Durban in South Africa. 

Released in 1963, Sammy Going South was based on a novel of the same name by W.T. Canaway, who had quite a reputation in the Sixties and Seventies, and also had a writing credit for The Ipcress File (1965), but seems forgotten today.

Alexander Mackendrick

It was the first film that its director Alexander Mackendrick had completed for six years. After reeling off some of the best films Ealing Studios was to make – Whisky Galore!, The Man in the White Suit, Mandy, The Ladykillers – he went to Hollywood to make Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Though it now has a towering critical reputation, it bombed on release and Mackendrick was then taken off two pictures that he had begun to direct – The Devil’s Disciple and The Guns of Navarone.

Mackendrick, who badly needed to complete another film, then went back to work for his old Ealing boss Sir Michael Balcon (the grandfather of Daniel Day-Lewis), who was now the head of Bryanston Films. But there turned out to be a chasm between their views of what their adaptation of Sammy Going South should look like.

As Mark Duguid has written:

Balcon saw the story as a heartwarming tale of a young innocent's triumph over adversity, against the fantastic scenery of the African continent. Characteristically, Mackendrick's understanding was altogether darker: he saw it as "the inward odyssey of a deeply disturbed child, who destroys everybody he comes up against".

You might say that for Mackendrick, Sammy was another of the lethal innocents in whom he rather specialised – think of the chaos that Mrs Wilberforce in The Ladykillers and Alec Guinness’s manic scientist in The Man in the White Suit provoke around them.

One result of these tensions was that Mackendrick’s original cut, which came in at over three hours, was reduced by Balcon to 128 minutes before release. The version that is shown from time to time on British television, and was released on DVD in 2010, is 10 minutes shorter still – no one seems to know quite when or why this further cut was made. 

A surprising amount of the strangeness and cruelty that Mackendrick found in Canaway’s novel survived into what was marketed as a family film. Within the first 25 minutes, Sammy has lost both his parents, been seized upon by a pedlar who clearly has sexual designs on him, and then found himself handcuffed to the man’s corpse.

As he makes his way south, Sammy is variously helped or hindered by the adults he meets. After a trek across the desert, first with the pedlar and then alone, he is taken up by a rich American woman. He runs away from her when he finds she wants to take him north with her, and then falls in with a group of Sudanese Muslims returning from the haj. 

The pilgrims’ leader, played by a stern Orlando Martins, is the only adult the boy meets in the early part of his journey who cares for him without selfish motives, but the boy abandons him for a Greek journalist who says he will take him to his aunt – and has ambitions to sell his story. The boy comes to distrust him and eventually runs away again.

Then, alone in the bush, Sammy is happened upon by a diamond smuggler played by Edward G. Robinson, whose performance and touching relationship with the boy will be what many viewers remember from the film. 

It looks as though the boy will stay with him permanently, but Robinson’s camp is broken up by the authorities and Sammy makes his way to his aunt alone. Quite how he manages this is skipped over, but in the novel he travels by light plane and train, and still has to fight off a bounty hunter at Durban station.

How Sammy became too happy

The success or failure of the film obviously relied to a great extent upon the casting of Sammy, and Mackendrick thought he had struck gold in Fergus McClelland, the 11-year-old son of Northern Irish actor Alan McClelland who, among many other roles, was in the original cast of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap alongside Richard Attenborough and Sheila Sim. 

Mackendrick, quoted in Philip Kerr’s biography of the director, said of him, with alarming objectivity: 

"He was a lean, hard, little boy. Tough as old nails ... a really strong character. He had the hunted look of an abused child, which in some ways he was. He came from a disturbed home; his parents were getting divorced and there were problems. So he was the perfect casting."

But something happened which explains why McClelland, who is convincingly ragged and itchy in his scenes with Orlando Martins, appears so happy and healthy when he meets Edward G. Robinson after trekking through the bush:

"But when he went out to Africa, he started having the time of his life. The unit adored him and, to my dismay, started to feed him ... he put on weight and there was no way I could stop it. So, instead of this hunted and abused child, who’s supposed to be starving and neurotic, you had a sturdy, stocky, well fed little character. A good actor, but the physique betrayed itself."

Mackendrick’s treatment of the boy during filming was as hard-hearted as his approach to casting. Appearing on BBC Radio Four’s The Film Programme in 2010, McClelland recalled the unit doctor telling the director at one point that he had to decide whether he wanted “a dead star or a live little boy”.

Some critics complained that McClelland’s acting was wooden until he met Edward G. Robinson, but this is not the first time a child actor had been blamed for following their director’s instructions. Preparing to shoot the film, Mackendrick had been to institutions to study traumatised and orphaned children, and this woodenness was what he saw in in them. McClelland was to go on acting for some years, appearing in both television plays and with the Royal Shakespeare Company, so other directors appreciated his talents too.

Edward G. Robinson and Harry H. Corbett

Mackendrick faced greater problems than his young lead becoming too happy and well fed: Edward G. Robinson suffered a serious heart attack early in the filming of his role. The result was that many of his scenes with the boy were shot with the participants being on different continents. 

Fergus McClelland was filmed in Africa, with Mackendrick reading the other part, and Edward G. Robinson in a studio in London, with Mackendrick this time reading the boy’s lines. It’s a mark of the director’s skill that these scenes are still so convincing and moving.

Another actor who deserves a mention is Harry H. Corbett, who plays Edward G. Robinson’s associate in the diamond smuggling game. Corbett had already made one series of Steptoe and Son, the classic BBC sitcom that was to make him a household name – soon every impersonator on television had to be able to take him off – but arguably blight his career. 

Before Steptoe, Corbett was called “the British Brando” by some, because he was a Method actor, and was the star Shakespearian in Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop company at Stratford East.

Fergus McClelland later became a voiceover artist and a trainer in business presentation, so there are plenty of his videos to be found online. In one of them, he recalls that Corbett did not talk to the other cast members much, but was friendly to him – the boy was allowed to call him “H.” 

Corbett told him that he didn’t plan on doing a second series of the comedy, but perhaps even one had fixed him in the public mind as Harold Steptoe and Harold Steptoe alone. One review of Sammy Going South referred to his “Steptoe accent”, as though it already counted against him as a serious actor.

Racial politics

The racial politics of Sammy Going South are muted: there is, for instance, no suggestion that by 1963 South Africa was a tainted haven for the boy to seek. Orlando Martins is allowed great dignity and Sammy is shown to need and appreciate his paternal authority. And, as a returning haji he appreciates that the boy is on a pilgrimage of his own. 

Beyond Martins, however, there is no other substantial Black character in a film set in entirely in Africa. The men who work for Edward G. Robinson are at least shown as a benign presence, singing a lullaby when the boy wakes suddenly in the back of their jeep.

It is the Greek journalist who suffers the worst stereotyping, particularly from the British officials, who still administrate Robinson’s part of East Africa. Those officials are verging on the comic themselves, and this is certainly no celebration of British Africa. 

The fact that Robinson has drawn for years on fuel dumps the Germans abandoned in 1918 suggests that the European presence in Africa is drawing to a close, something his character explicitly says. That wasn’t to stop Britain’s private schools turning out ideal types to run the Empire for two or three decades after it ceased to exist.

Sammy goes west

I can’t argue that Sammy Going South is a forgotten masterpiece, but it is better than its reputation and is interesting in so many ways. As a study of childhood trauma and recovery; as a document of the last days of the British Empire; and as a film by one of Britain’s best directors, who was soon to give up making films and devote himself to teaching instead.

The film was trimmed yet again for the US market, given a new title (the ludicrous, to my eyes, A Boy Ten Feet Tall) and a new soundtrack. Joe Dante even claims that this version is better than the original: I’ve not seen it, but the omission of most of Orlando Martins’s scenes makes that sound unlikely. 

But I can at least show you the trailer for this version. I wonder if Steven Spielberg saw A Boy Ten Feet Tall: am I alone in being reminded of Empire of the Sun by the scene of the boy amid the bombing of Port Said?

I suspect this American version is closer to what Michael Balcon had hoped for from the shoot. Me? I mourn Mackendrick’s lost, darker three-hour version.

Joan Littlewood on Brian Murphy's This is Your Life

I've written several times about Joan Littlewood and her extraordinary influence on British theatre. Here is a short clip of her, recorded for Brian Murphy's This is Your Life.

In the run up to it, you hear what an extraordinary struggle it was for someone from the working class, like Murphy, to get training as an actor.

And after it, there's confirmation that Joan Littlewood didn't just have connections with ITV comedy (half the cast of On the Buses came from her Stratford East company), she had them with BBC comedy too.

I've written about the 30 years of slog Nigel Hawthorne experienced before he became famous overnight in Yes Minister. As I say in that post, he once said he owed his career to Joan Littlewood – she had cast him as Field Marshall Haig in a touring production of Oh! What a Lovely War.

I'd also read that Jimmy Perry, one of the writers of Dad's Army, had spent time at Stratford East, and here he is confirming it.

Sparrows Can’t Sing Q&A with Barbara Windsor and Murray Melvin

Joan Littlewood directed only one film, Sparrows Can't Sing. It was based on the play Sparrers Can't Sing, which was written by Stephen Lewis (better known later as Blakey off of On the Buses) and staged by her at Stratford East.

Here two cast members, Barbara Windsor and Murray Melvin, remember the making of the film and Littlewood's approach in general. Barbara Windsor is in sparkling form.

As I posted this video on Liberal England about 10 years ago, I'm adding another one with Murray Melvin . It's very good, but I'll admit it's here mainly because of the still photo of Joan Littlewood and Stephen Lewis that appears early on.

For another appreciation of Joan Littlweood, try Sheila Hancock.

The rise and fall and (slight) rise of Lionel Bart

By my calculation, this edition of The South Bank Show dates from 1994. As much of my politics come from reading Oliver Twist too young, and as Oliver! is the great British musical. I had to watch it.

And there is much to enjoy, beginning with Lionel Bart's adventures in the new world of pop music with Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard.

Then there's Oliver!, whose first night was just as triumphant as Bart makes it sound. On to the film, where I note that Mark Lester was still giving the impression that he sang in it. He didn't.

The disaster of Twang!! caused the crash of Bart's career, but maybe the warning signs were there with his musical Blitz!, which Noel Coward claimed was "twice as loud and twice as long as the real thing".

Note the presence of Mark Steyn, who had yet to reinvent himself as a commentator on geopolitics. As I wrote of him in 2008:

Steyn is a good film critic, able to write intelligently about unintelligent films. But the fact that for several years his was the predominant voice on foreign affairs in the British Conservative press was simply bizarre.

If you enjoy this, it gives me the excuse to give another plug for the superlative South Bank Show on the London production of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. 

The long, long apprenticeship of Sir Nigel Hawthorne

Before Yes Minister made him famous in 1980, Nigel Hawthorne served a long apprenticeship in the acting profession. But I had not grasped till recently just how long that apprenticeship had been.

If you click on the arrow above, you will see him in a scene from Going Straight, the short-lived sitcom that followed Norman Stanley Fletcher after his release from the Slade Prison of Porridge.

That scene dates from 1978, but he had a bit part in an episode of Dad's Army as early as 1969. I recall a story that someone had gone to David Croft on Hawthorne's behalf, saying he was a very good actor who was getting many parts and asking if Croft could offer him something. Croft did, though as I recall Hawthorne doesn't really convince as a lorry driver.

But I've now know that Hawthorne's apprenticeship stretched right back to the start of the Fifties, and two of this blog's heroines helped me discover this.

Here's Sheila Hancock writing in The Two of Us: My Life with John Thaw:

I was thrilled to be so near London where someone might see me. I was playing quite a good role but whenever I was in danger of getting a laugh, Frank would intervene with, "No, don't laugh – poor soul – she went to the RADA, you know" (pronounced radar by Frank). "No perlease, perlease have some respect."

Nigel Hawthorne and I watched in awe as he jettisoned the script and went off into wild fantasies of his own It was one of Frank's frequent periods in the theatrical wilderness and no one important came near us, but supporting this anguished man gave us a friend for life.

With the help of the British Newspaper Archive I can tell you that this all took place in 1956.

Two years earlier, Hawthorne had been in the supporting cast when Freda Jackson returned to her alma mater, the Theatre Royal, Northampton, to play Marguerite Gautier in The Lady of the Camelias. He was in the repertory company there in 1954 and 1955.

He was acting with the company at the Pavilion Gardens, Buxton, as early as 1951. Hawthorne had first gone on the stage in South Africa in 1950, and was to alternate between Britain and South Africa for a few years without finding much in success in either.

And we have a part for a third heroine of the blog. Because, just as Sheila Hancock does, Hawthorne said he owed his career to Joan Littlewood.

Here's Markland Taylor reviewing Hawthorne's Straight Face, The Autobiography, which was published just after his death, in Variety:

Hawthorne’s luck changed magnificently when he downed six bottles of Guinness before auditioning for a role in a production of Littlewood’s hit

Oh! What a Lovely War planned for a tour of England and Europe, and was cast.

This led to his invaluable relationship with Littlewood and his career blossomed, leading to highly rewarding work on stage, screen and television.

This was in 1964, so Hawthorne still had 16 years to wait before be became famous overnight. This is a story about talent and persistence, but it may ultimately be one about having the right mentor.

How Joan Littlewood changed Sheila Hancock's life

My interest in Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop at Stratford East and obsession with the original London production of Sweeney Todd meet in this video.

And it's all true. Here's R.B. Marriott reviewing the first West End performance of Make Me An Offer for The Stage (24 December 1959): 

Sheila Hancock, who originally made a personal hit in the production, repeats her success, and on the first night stopped the show with her singing of "It's Sort of Romantic". 

Miss Hancock is now unlikely to be in need of work in the theatre, but I hope that her originality, talent and personality will eventually be given far wider scope, not only in "suitable" supporting parts but in leading ones, for which undoubtedly she is equipped. 

Blakey off of On the Buses and radical theatre

In Kibworth the other day, I visited Daker Books and bought a second-hand copy of John Russell Taylor's Anger and After, a book about the British theatre in the late Fifties and early Sixties.

I think the Fifties were a more interesting decade than we now imagine - the centrality of live theatre to the culture being just one reason. 

As Sebastian Millbank pointed out in an article on The Critic, it's noteworthy that the modern left shows no affection for a decade that saw full employment, widespread union membership and rising wages.

When I got Anger and After home, I looked up one minor writer in the index and was directed to a pleasingly chunky passage:

Another improvisation along rather the same lines was Stephen Lewis's Sparrers Can't Sing, a lackadaisical picture of Stepney life revolving round the return from jail after nearly ten years of the paterfamilias to meet again the wife he hit with a poker. There was no plot to speak of, but the characters who wandered in and out, particularly the two old derelicts locked in deadly combat with the National Assistance, made pleasant enough company while they were around and lent a certain colour to the assertion by their ex-electrician's mate creator that "The world as seen through the bottom of a pint pot is much more entertaining than that usually seen through opera glasses, and less distorted." 

The play, after a not very successful transfer to the West End, became the basis of Joan Littlewood's first foray into the cinema; slightly retitled as Sparrows Can't Sing and almost completely reworked by Joan Littlewood and the author, it emerged as the story of a randy young sailor's return from the sea to find his pretty young wife living with a bus driver in a rebuilt East End of towering modern flats, most of the material about the old people, the National Assistance and so on having disappeared somewhere along the way. 

Subsequently Stephen Lewis has written Wagger, a subdued television piece in a very similar style about a crippled cobbler and the tentative beginnings of his romance with a girl who works in the baker's across the road, sat against a background of bitter family bickering.

Stephen Lewis could act as well as write. He appeared at Stratford East and the Royal Court, and his turn as the caretaker of a new block of flats who relishes all the regulations he has to enforce is one of the best things in Sparrows Can't Sing.

Anger and After was written before be became famous as Blakey in On the Buses.

Book Review... Ma'am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown

Playing herself at the Borsetshire Fashion Show on The Archers in 1984, she sounded curiously flat and uninvolved, almost as though she couldn’t get to grips with her own character. After the first run-through, the producer, William Smethurst said: “That’s very good, Ma’am, but do you think you could sound as if you were enjoying yourself a little more?”

“Well, I wouldn’t be, would I?” replied the princess.

Craig Brown noticed Princess Margaret's ubiquity when researching an earlier book of his. Open the biography of any public figure from the second half of the 20th century and she will be there in the index. Usually you will be directed to an anecdote about her where she appears haughty or rude.

Brown has turned these brief appearances into a study of Margaret. The tale is familiar: the failure to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend, the marriage to Lord Snowdon, the years of fun and scandal on Mustique, the decline in her health from too much tobacco  and alcohol, the death a few weeks before that of her mother.

Yet I learnt plenty that was new from Ma'am Darling. Margaret's wish to marry the war hero Townsend alarmed the royal family and court because he was divorced from his first wife. She was persuaded to abandon the idea and him by pressure that went all the way up to threatening to cut her off without a penny. Today's public would be more concerned that Townsend was 16 years older than Margaret, who had been only 13 when they met. After parting from Margaret, he went on to wed an even younger woman.

The happiest time in Margaret's life seems to have been the early years of her marriage to Lord Snowdon, when they were London's most fashionable couple - this was a few years before it began to Swing - and moved in glittering social and artistic circles, But their relationship soon soured, and Snowdon treated her with calculated cruelty.

Later she sought solace in the millionaire's paradise of Mustique with the amusing (Roddy Llewelyn) and the criminal (John Bindon). Then her health began to decline and she was seen about no more. She died in 2002, aged 71.

It was not a happy life, and reading about it strengthened my belief that a strong argument against having a monarchy is the impossible lives members of the Royal Family are forced to live.

Ma'am Darling has no index - I took the story about Margaret's appearance on The Archers, which is in the book, from a Guardian article - but I think I'm right in saying that the book omits the one wholly creditable story I have heard about Margaret.

This time I am quoting BBC News on Joan Littlewood's play Oh! What a Lovely War:

Littlewood gave the show a new political bite, as befitted a nation growing tired of deference. The family of Field Marshal Douglas Haig wanted to stop the show reaching the West End, claiming the portrayal of him was a crude caricature.

But [Victor] Spinetti recalls a useful royal visit when the play was still in Stratford. "One evening Princess Margaret came with Lord Cobbold, who as Lord Chamberlain was also the theatre censor.

"Afterwards Princess Margaret came backstage and said 'Well Miss Littlewood those things should have been said many years ago - don't you agree, Lord Cobbold?' He gave a thin smile and said 'Oh yes ma'am'. And Joan knew that was our permission to go into the West End."